Part 7
When from school o’er Little Field with its brook and wooden brig, Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big, While I held my little plough though ’twas but a willow twig, And drove my team along made of nothing but a name, “Gee hep” and “hoit” and “woi”--O I never call to mind These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind, While I see little mouldiwarps hang sweeing to the wind On the only aged willow that in all the field remains, And nature hides her face while they’re sweeing in their chains And in a silent murmuring complains.
The pity that we find in this poem is, perhaps, the dominant emotion in Clare’s work. Helpless living things made the strongest appeal to him, and he honoured the spear-thistle, as it had never been honoured in poetry before, chiefly because of the protection it gave to the nesting partridge and the lark. In “Spear Thistle,” after describing the partridge, which will lie down in a thistle-clump,
and dust And prune its horse-shoe circled breast,
he continues:
The sheep when hunger presses sore May nip the clover round its nest; But soon the thistle wounding sore Relieves it from each brushing guest That leaves a bit of wool behind, The yellow-hammer loves to find.
The horse will set his foot and bite Close to the ground lark’s guarded nest And snort to meet the prickly sight; He fans the feathers of her breast-- Yet thistles prick so deep that he Turns back and leaves her dwelling free.
We have only to compare the detail of Clare’s work with the sonorous generalisations in, say, Thomson’s _Seasons_--which he admired--to realise the immense gulf that divides Clare from his eighteenth-century predecessors. Clare, indeed, is more like a twentieth-century than an eighteenth-century poet. He is almost more like a twentieth-century than a nineteenth-century poet. He is “neo-Georgian” in his preference for the fact in itself above the image or the phrase. The thing itself is all the image he asks, and Mr. W. H. Davies in his simplest mood might have made the same confession of faith as Clare:
I love the verse that mild and bland Breathes of green fields and open sky, I love the muse that in her hand Bears flowers of native poesy; Who walks nor skips the pasture brook In scorn, but by the drinking horse Leans o’er its little brig to look How far the sallows lean across.
There is no poet, I fancy, in whose work the phrase, “I love,” recurs oftener. His poetry is largely a list of the things he loves:
I love at early morn, from new-mown swath To see the startled frog his route pursue; To mark while, leaping o’er the dripping path, His bright sides scatter dew, The early lark that from its bustle flies To hail his matin new; And watch him to the skies:
To note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent, The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn, With earnest heed and tremulous intent, Frail brother of the morn, That from the tiny bents and misted leaves Withdraws his timid horn, And fearful visions weaves.
As we read Clare we discover that it is almost always the little things that catch his eye:
Grasshoppers go in many a thrumming spring, And now to stalks of tasselled sow-grass cling, That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight; While arching ox-eye doubles with his weight. Next on the cat-tail grass with farther bound He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.
He is never weary of describing the bees. He praises the ants. Of the birds, he seems to love the small ones best. How beautifully he writes of the hedge-sparrow’s little song!:
While in a quiet mood hedge-sparrows try An inward stir of shadowed melody.
There is the genius of a lover in this description. Here is something finally said. Clare continually labours to make the report of his eye and ear accurate. He even begins one of his _Asylum Poems_ with the line:
Sweet chestnuts brown like soling leather turn;
and, in another, pursues realism in describing an April evening to the point of writing:
Sheep ointment seems to daub the dead-hued sky.
His attempt at giving an exact echo of the blue-tit’s song--his very feeble attempt--makes the success of one of his good poems tremble for a moment in the balance:
Dreamers, mark the honey bee; Mark the tree Where the blue cap “_tootle tee_” Sings a glee, Sung to Adam and to Eve-- Here they be. When floods covered every bough, Noah’s ark Heard that ballad singing now; Hark, hark.
“_Tootle, tootle, tootle tee_”-- Can it be Pride and fame must shadows be? Come and see-- Every season owns her own; Bird and bee Sing creation’s music on; Nature’s glee Is in every mood and tone Eternity.
Clare comes nearer an imaginative vision of life in this than in most of his poems. But, where Shelley would have given us an image, Clare is content to set down “_Tootle, tootle, tootle tee_.”
His poems of human life are of less account than his poems of bird and insect life; but one of the most beautiful of all his poems, “The Dying Child,” introduces a human figure among the bees and flowers. How moving are the first three verses!:
He could not die when trees were green, For he loved the time too well. His little hands, when flowers were seen, Were held for the bluebell, As he was carried o’er the green.
His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee, He knew those children of the spring: When he was well and on the lea, He held one in his hands to sing, Which filled his heart with glee.
Infants, the children of the spring! How can an infant die When butterflies are on the wing, Green grass, and such a sky? How can they die at spring?
The writer of these lines was a poet worth rediscovering, and Messrs. Blunden and Porter have given us a book in which we can wander at will, peering into hedges and at the traffic of the grass, as in few even of the great poets. Mr. Blunden has also written an admirable, though needlessly pugnacious account of the life of The Green Man, as Clare was called in Lamb’s circle because of his clothes. It is a story of struggle, poverty, drink, a moment’s fame without money to correspond, a long family, and the madness of a man who, escaping from the asylum, ate “the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste something like bread.” Knowing the events of his life, we read Clare’s poetry with all the more intense curiosity. And, if we do not expect to find a Blake or a Wordsworth, we shall not be disappointed. Certainly this is a book that must go on the shelf near the works of Mr. Hudson.
XII
HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS
Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts of writing--the entertaining and the dull--and the dull is outside literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled. A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one absorbing figure, would devote one volume to this bit of him and another to that, and would leave us with a mass of information about his _disjecta membra_, which we might or might not piece together, just as we pleased. This was called scientific history. Its disciples forgot that history is an art and that, like all other arts, whatever its ultimate object, it should be subject to the law of entertainment. Nothing else will keep history alive, except as a schoolbook or a source-book. An inaccurate history that entertains will outlive an accurate history that wearies. Herodotus did not cease to be read, even when he was generally regarded as the father of lies. It is true that scholars no longer regard him as a liar, and that Mr. Godley, in the preface to his admirable translation in the Loeb Library, claims with Dr. Macan that “the most stringent application of historical and critical methods to the text of Herodotus leaves the work irrevocably and irreplaceably at the head of European prose literature, whether in its scientific or in its artistic character.” At the same time, even if we did not know about the scientific value of Herodotus, his artistic value would be indisputable. He was as indefatigably interested in the world as Mr. Pepys was in himself, and he can infect us with the thrill of his delightful curiosity.
Curiosity, on the other hand, implies interest in some sort of truth, and the pursuit of some sort of truth seems to be an essential in a book that is to entertain us permanently. The artist is moralist as well as entertainer, and the truth that lies in him shapes his work, whether he is Æschylus or Plato, Herodotus or Sallust. Sallust’s _Jugurtha_, Professor Rolfe warns us in a preface to the Loeb translation, “is rather like a historical novel of the better class than like sober history” and the _Cataline_, we are told, “is inaccurate in many of its details ... with inevitable distortion of the facts.” Even so, both works are entertaining statements of a great moral idea--the idea of the corruption of human nature by success. Sallust, it may be argued, had the propagandist purpose of attacking the corruption of the nobles rather than the moral purpose of exhibiting the corruption of human nature, but he writes his history with an amazing dramatic sense of the catastrophe that occurs even in great souls. It occurred in the soul of Jugurtha, and in the soul of Rome. “When Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence the lust for power, then for money, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils.” What is all literature but the fable of such things? It may be an inspiring fable or a derisive fable, a tragic fable or a comic fable, but in any event it cannot be good literature unless it is an entertaining fable.
Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable. That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ, was led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians. Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this. He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in human nature even at its greatest as the Greek dramatists and the supreme Greek biographer.
There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes. His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece:
Now among these women was Sempronia, who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband and children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune; well read in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and dance more skilfully than an honest woman need, and having many other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or her honour; her desires were so ardent that she sought men more often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the conspiracy, she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts, been privy to murder; poverty and extravagance combined had driven her headlong. Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and charm.
A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!
But, even as gossips, how these ancient historians still keep their hold on us! Herodotus is the father of nursery tales as well as of moral tales. His account of Egypt in the second book of his history may appeal to the anthropologist in some of us; it also appeals to the child in all of us. He must have omitted thousands of the stories that he heard on his travels, but he had a genius for finding room for the interesting story. His pages are rich in attractive stories like that which tells how Psammetichus decided whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the oldest nation:
Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed themselves to be the oldest nation on earth.... Psammetichus, being nowise able to discover by enquiry what men had first come into being, devised a plan whereby he took two new-born children of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flock. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due season the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for, when the shepherd had done as he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and entered, both the children ran to him, stretching out their hands and calling “Bekos.” When he first heard this he said nothing of it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master, and on command brought the children into the King’s presence. Psammetichus heard them himself, and enquired to what language this word “Bekos” might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed that the Phrygians were older than they.
Scientific? Perhaps not. And yet science and art may embrace in the recording of such stories as this. But it is in the museum of the arts, not in that of the sciences, that Herodotus holds his immortal place. He may not be the first of the scientific historians: he is certainly the first of the European masters of the art of entertaining prose.
XIII
A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY
A good many people were pleased--not without malice--when Professor Harper discovered a few years ago that Wordsworth had an illegitimate daughter. It was like hearing a piece of scandal about an archbishop. As a matter of fact, the story, as Professor Harper tells it, is not a scandal; it is merely a puzzle. The figures in the episode are names and shadows: we know almost nothing as regards their feelings for each other or what it was that prevented the lovers from marrying. Professor Harper believes that Wordsworth has left a disguised version of the story in _Vaudracour and Julia_. Wordsworth himself says of _Vaudracour and Julia_ that “the facts are true,” and the main “facts” in the poem are that the lovers wish to marry, cannot gain their parent’s consent, and give way to passion, and that after this their parents, instead of softening in their attitude, insist more harshly than ever on keeping them apart. Wordsworth is vehement in his contention that Vaudracour was no common seducer yielding to the lusts of the flesh, and the suggestion is fairly clear that the youth thought he was taking the only way to make marriage inevitable. Consider these lines, which impute honourable motives, if not honourable conduct, to the lover:
So passed the time, till whether through effect Of some unguarded moment that dissolved Virtuous restraint--ah, speak it, think it, not! Deem rather that the fervent youth, who saw So many bars between his present state And the dear haven where he wished to be In honourable wedlock with his love, Was in his judgment tempted to decline To perilous weakness, and entrust his cause To nature for a happy end of all; Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayed And bear with their transgression, when I add That Julia, wanting yet the name of wife, Carried about her for a secret grief, The promise of a mother.
These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor Harper has collected a number of facts that make it appear likely that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.
Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious. Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism. They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth with the same horror with which a reader of the _Morning Post_ would learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth may well have appeared to these orthodox parents a representative of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be looked on as invalid--as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary. Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had already gone so far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette. Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her relatives and yet desired to remain near her.